Tag Archives: machine vision

Weekly output: video surveillance, privacy vs. security, Facebook listening, universal basic income, intelligent assistants, convenience economy, UberAir, privacy fears

Posted on by
2

Once again, I’m at an airport. I got back from Web Summit on Friday, and now I’m headed to San Francisco for the Internet Association’s Virtuous Circle conference. This trip, however, will be a lot shorter than the last one: I fly back Wednesday.

11/6/2017: ‘Smart’ surveillance cameras should set off privacy alarms, Yahoo Finance

The advances in machine vision I saw demonstrated at the Nvidia GPU Tech Conference in D.C. last week both impressed and alarmed me–especially when I heard some of the responses of executives at companies bringing these artificial-intelligence technologies to the market.

11/7/2017: Debate: We should be prepared to give up our privacy for security, Web Summit

My first Web Summit panel was a debate between Threatscape managing director Dermot Williams and Federal Trade Commission commissioner Terrell McSweeny. I expected a one-sided audience vote at the end in favor of privacy, but Williams changed a few minds. There should be video of this somewhere, but I’ve yet to find it on Web Summit’s Facebook page.

11/8/2017: Why so many people still think Facebook is listening to them, Yahoo Finance

I’d had this post in the works for a while, and then CNN’s Laurie Segall asked Facebook’s Messenger head Stan Chudnovsky in a Summit panel about the persistent rumor that Facebook’s apps listen surreptitiously to your conversations. Hello, news peg.

11/8/2017: Double focus: IPO’s & the future of games, Web Summit

My contribution to Web Summit’s Wednesday programming was this interview of Rovio CEO Kati Levoranta. As you can probably guess from watching the video below, I exhausted my questions early on and had to improv a bunch of it.

11/9/2017: Why would you oppose Universal Basic Income?, Web Summit

This panel, held at one of the small stages in Web Summit’s speakers lounge, featured Basic Income Earth Network co-president Guy Standing, Kela change management director Marjukka Turunen, GiveDirectly CEO Michael Faye, and Portuguese foreign minister Augusto Santos Silva. Not having taken part in any extended debate on this topic before, I learned a few things from this conversation.

11/9/2017: The next evolution of intelligent assistants, Web Summit

I quizzed Sherpa founder Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria about what he thinks the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google miss in the AI-personal-assistant market and how he hopes to carve out a niche with his own app.

11/9/2017: Demand more: Driving the convenience economy, Web Summit

The last of Thursday’s three panels had me interviewing Trivago co-founder and CEO Rolf Schromgens and Casper co-founder Luke Sherwin about how each is trying to challenge long-established competitors. This panel featured an unexpected technical difficulty: The acoustics made it hard for Schromgens, seated farther away from me on the stage, to hear me.

11/9/2017: Uber’s grand plan for flying cars faces a major obstacle, Yahoo Finance

One of first thoughts about “UberAir” was something along the lines of “you’re really going to get the FAA to open up the national air system to flocks of new electric-powered air taxis?” A conversation over e-mail with aviation-safety expert Bob Mann led me to believe Uber is being predictably optimistic about the odds of it bending government regulators to its will.

11/12/2017: Web companies should make it easier to make your data portable: FTC’s McSweeny. USA Today

This column about the privacy discussions that carried on all week long in Lisbon benefited from a little luck: My debate partner from day one was on both of my flights back from Lisbon and even sat a row behind me on the EWR-DCA hop, so we had a quick chat after arriving at National Airport before she headed to the parking garage and I got on Metro.

Updated 11/27/2017 to add an embed of video of my first Web Summit panel.

Advertisement

Weekly output: mobile mergers, future of music, Google+ image recognition, Mavericks Mail, Yahoo security

Posted on by
Reply

If I didn’t have a calendar to tell me November had arrived, the recent acceleration in the frequency of CES PR pitches would clue me in almost as well.

10/29/2013: M&As: Industry Pulse Check, Enterprise Mobile Hub

I returned to my occasional role as Twitter-chat host for IDG Enterprise’s site for this discussion of the upsides and downsides of mergers in the wireless industry.

10/30/2013: Streaming, Selling Scarcity And Other Ways To Remix the Music Business, Disruptive Competition Project

My recap of the discussions at this year’s Future of Music Summit spotlighted some enlightening data about where musicians make they money these days and conflicting views on the potential of streaming-music services such as Spotify. I left the conference thinking, once again, that more journalists should pay attention to indie artists’ attempts to find a more solid economic footing–our business-model issues are not too different, even if we’re a lot less cool.

Google+ image-recognition post11/1/2013: Google+ Gambles on Image Recognition, Discovery News

My final post at Discovery (see yesterday’s post for more about that), had a little fun with Google+ image recognition’s performance in some sample searches of the photos I’ve been uploading from various mobile devices since G+’s debut. If only the screengrabs I took to illustrate this were not so unavoidably boring…

11/3/2013: How to fix Mail glitches in Mavericks, USA Today

My editor said my first draft of this column was a little in the weeds, and she was right: The issue here isn’t just Apple’s Mail app reacting badly when asked to sync with Gmail, it’s Apple’s failure to give users a heads-up about the change or explain it later on. As you can see in the comments, I goofed about the price of Mailplane–it’s $24.95 instead of free–so we’ll get that bit corrected.

On Sulia, I applauded the maturity of iPad users who didn’t mob Apple’s stores to buy the new iPad Air, voiced a similar skepticism about the need to trade in my Nexus 4 phone for the new Nexus 5, predicted some awkwardness in Twitter’s automatically displaying many shared images and complimented Spotify and services like it for being a much easier way to discover the Velvet Underground (RIP, Lou Reed) than radio.